Techtrend

In recent months, Gail Tverberg in particular, along with Steven Kopits and Ron Patterson, have examined both the financial and production details as they pertain to the various shale formations now serving as the fossil fuel industry’s current energy supply and production savior. They provide us all with invaluable information about the prospects for maintaining a Business As Usual future. [For more, see these: 1. 2. 3. 4.]

Pointing out the investment challenges [Kopits] the industry faces as it attempts to at least sustain recent production totals—which are giving indication of some questionable trends [Patterson]—while making the clear connection to the prospects for continuing growth [Tverberg], the big picture suggests that the rosy and abundant scenarios suggested by industry officials and media may not be quite so rosy and abundant after all.

Last year, an excellent report by Deborah Rogers: Shale and Wall Street: Was The Decline In Natural Gas Prices Orchestrated?, offered a look into some of the investment practices and decisions of (primarily) gas and oil production companies. The picture she painted suggested at a minimum some very curious efforts and decisions were employed in developing the financial infrastructure enabling shale gas and oil production.

But not to worry; it appears that some on Wall Street made out just fine! What a relief, Right?

Wall Street promoted the shale gas drilling frenzy, which resulted in prices lower than the cost of production and thereby profited [enormously] from mergers & acquisitions and other transactional fees.
U.S. shale gas and shale oil reserves have been overestimated by a minimum of 100% and by as much as 400-500% by operators according to actual well production data filed in various states.

That information, among other findings in Ms. Rogers study, details a fascinating piece to the puzzle of current and future production efforts which did not garner nearly the amount of publicity it should have. The information she presented helps paint a broader picture of what’s involved and needed to at least sustain production totals in a world where conventional crude oil peaked a decade ago—clever expanded definitions of “crude oil” notwithstanding. Given what occurred, all is not well.

Industry is demonstrating reticence to engage in further shale investment, abandoning pipeline projects, IPOs and joint venture projects in spite of public rhetoric proclaiming shales to be a panacea for U.S. energy policy….
It is imperative that shale be examined thoroughly and independently to assess the true value of shale assets, particularly since policy on both the state and national level is being implemented based on production projections that are overtly optimistic (and thereby unrealistic) and wells that are significantly underperforming original projections.

That doesn’t sound nearly as pleasant as industry officials would like the story told, does it? Reality tends to muck up those nice scenarios, which is why we too often get such small doses of the important information we all need to understand what lies ahead (and what does not). It also appears Ms. Rogers left out more than a little bit of the fluff which usually pads the facts.

Shale development is not about long-term economic promise for a region. Such economic promise has failed to materialize beyond the first few years of a shale play’s life in any region of the U.S. today that has relative shale maturity.

Well that’s not a good thing! Nor is this conclusion, after highlighting the less than majestic job creation totals touted by fracking proponents, the ghastly well decline rates, and a paucity of bidders for asset, all of which:

suggest a recognition within the industry of the questionable economics and short life span of shales.

It’s actually just another confirmation that those counting on shale development to provide endless economic joy for regions embracing those efforts might come up a wee bit short in the forecasting department.

That’s all fairly important information. I wonder why we don’t hear more about that?

http://peakoil.com/generalideas/peak-oil-peeking-behind-a-curtain

A week ago, Google held a press briefing at its expansive campus in Mountain View, California, aimed at showing off the progress it has made in its drive toward producing a self-driving car. The results, according to all who witnessed the company’s fleet of Lexus SUVs make their way around the streets of Mountain View without so much as a hiccup, were, in a word, impressive. (Well, The New York Times’ John Markoff called it “boring,” which is about as high a complement as you can pay an engineering project whose ultimate intention is to remove the “excitement”—meaning the tens of thousands of deaths each year on U.S. roads—from automobile travel.)

Christopher Urmson, a former Carnegie Mellon University computer scientist who heads the project, gave a brief overview of the project’s evolution from its original goal of driving 100 000 miles safely in highway traffic conditions to driving on city streets. (The fleet has now passed the 700 000-mile mark.) Urmson said that driving local routes was “100 times more difficult than freeway driving.” But despite the constant barrage of stimuli local roads offer, the cars apparently do a (not) bang-up job.

Before Google’s self-driving car can do for all of us what it did for reporters last week, the Internet search giant has another massive project to undertake. As we reported in the Automaton blog back in 2011, it’s all about the maps:

First, it relies on very detailed maps of the roads and terrain, something that Urmson said is essential to determine accurately where the car is. Using GPS-based techniques alone, he said, the location could be off by several meters.

 

Andrew Chatham, who heads the team’s mapping effort, described it thusly last week as reported in The Atlantic:

“We tell it how high the traffic signals are off the ground, the exact position of the curbs, so the car knows where not to drive,” he said. “We’d also include information that you can’t even see like implied speed limits.” This keeps the burden on the car’s software to a minimum. “We tell it what the world is expected to look like when it is empty,” said Chatham. “And then the job of the software is to figure out how the world is different from that expectation.”

Therein lies a big problem—and the next, rather massive, challenge. The vehicles in Google’s fleet definitely qualify as smart cars. But if you plunked one down in a random city that the Google team has yet to exhaustively map, it would be akin to Superman being unable to switch out of his guise as mild-mannered reporter Clark Kent. When the digitized female voice says “Autodriving,” indicating the switch to automated-driving mode, it would be no more capable than the car you drive to work every day.

Google has so far done the work of having human drivers traverse the roads in the vicinity of its campus. But that’s only 3200 kilometers of road out of the roughly 6.4 million kilometers comprising the U.S. road network.

And although Google has sent drivers down all these roads for its Google Maps project (I can’t remember the last time I even saw a paper map), the level of detail required for automated driving is far higher than what you need to ensure that you don’t get lost on the way to the restaurant your friends raved about during their last vacation.

So, how long will this mapping take? Though Google cofounder Sergey Brin has said publicly that the suite of sensors and the compilation of gadgets that apply the captured data would be commercially available by 2017, Urmson suggested a date closer to 2020. By then, perhaps, Google will have spread its mapping, and the “boredom” of automated driving, over a much greater swath of the United States.

 

 

 

http://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-think/transportation/self-driving/will-consumers-interested-in-googles-selfdriving-cars-suffer-from-map-anxiety/?utm_source=carsthatthink&utm_medium=email&utm_campai

http://articles.sae.org/13055/

일 자동차회사들 내연기관 엔진 친환경성 높인다

일본 자동차 8사가 공동으로 환경 부하가 적은 자동차용 엔진의 기초 연구에 나선다. 디젤 엔진의 이산화탄소 배출량을 2020년까지 2010년 대비 30% 저감하는 연소 기술 등을 개발하고 성과는 각사가 가솔린차도 포함해 실용화에 나서기로 했다.

글로벌 시장의 경쟁을 위해 연비개선에 관련한 혁신이 반드시 필요하다는 생각에서 시작된 것이다. 일본 자동차회사들은 대학등과 제휴해 환경성능에서 경쟁하고 있는 유럽 메이커들에 대응해 나가기로 했다.

발명 후 130년이 지나는 동안 40% 가까이 달한 가솔린 엔진의 최고 열효율은 앞으로 10년 동안 50% 가까이 달할 것으로 전망되고 있다. 최근에는 지금까지 전동화 등 엔진 이외의 부분에서의 연비 향상에 힘을 들여 온 일본 자동차회사들이 엔진 자체의 개량에 본격적으로 힘을 쏟는다는 방침이다. 하이브리드카끼리의 연비 경쟁이 심해진 데 더해 내연기관 엔진을 사용하는 자동차의 연비 향상이 글로벌 시장에서 큰 도전과제가 되어있다는 것을 의식한 결과다.

토요타자동차는 지난 2014년 4월 10일 동경 본사에서 연소 개량 등에 의해 기존 엔진보다 10% 이상의 연비 향상을 실현하는 신 개발 엔진의 기술 설명회를 열었다. 근 미래에 출시 예정인 파소 등에 탑재할 1리터와 1.3리터 가솔린 엔진의 성능과 기구 등 제반 사항을 발표했다. 또한 2015년까지 모두 14개 종류의 새로운 엔진을 글로벌 시장에 투입할 계획이라고 덧붙였다.

14기종의 투입이 완료되면 세계에서 판매되는 토요타차의 약 30%가 새로운 엔진군이 될 것으로 예측했다. 또한 14기의 새로운 엔진 시리즈에는 자연흡기 가솔린 엔진 외 과급기용 가솔린, 그리고 디젤과 하이브리드차 용의 엔진도 포함되어 있다고 설명했다.

우선 1리터급 소배기량 가솔린 엔진 두 종류를 출시하고 2015년까지 최대 5리터까지 모두 14기종을 내놓게 된다. 하이브리드카에 더해 기존 내연기관 엔진차의 연비도 높여 에코카의ㅣ 폭을 확대해 나간다. 개발도상국과 하이브리드카의 보급률이 낮은 유럽등에서 판매 경쟁을 높이기 위함이다.

하이브리드용 엔진에서 사용되고 있는 열효율이 높은 연소방식을 일반 엔진에도 활용한다. 연료가 연소되는 속도를 높이고 연소불량을 억제하는 기술을 사용하는 등의 기술에 의해 하이브리드 수준의 38%의 열효율을 실현했다. 적은 연료로 동력을 살리기 때문에 연비가 좋아진다. 아이들링 방지 기능 등과 조합하면 연비가 최대 약 30% 향상된다.

토요타는 지금까지 하이브리드를 축으로 연비 개선을 추진해 왔다. 토요타의 일본 내판매대수에서 하이브리드의 비율은 약 40%. 그에 비해 글로벌 판매대수에서는 10% 정도에 그치고 있다. 글로벌 시장에서 경쟁하기 위해서는 내연기관 자체의 개선이 필요하다는 생각을 갖게 된 이유다.

엔진의 개량은 하이브리드의 성능 향상에도 연결된다. 토요타는 2015년에는 프리우스의 차기모델을 출시할 예정이다. 이번 엔진 기술은 하이브리드 시스템과 조합되는 것도 가능해 머지 않아 리터당 연비를 32.6km에서 40km까지 끌어 올릴 수 있을 것으로 전망하고 있다.

http://www.global-autonews.com/board/view.php3?table=bd_009&gubun=1&idx=10297